A clear distinction. The fruit of the earth—vegetation, herbs, whatever you might want to call it—is man's portion; but life is God's. Man's life is what God has claimed as His part of the creation, and this points out why He did not want us to eat blood. It is because the life of the flesh is in the blood. And so the blood represents life—and that was God's.
So within the context of the offerings, life symbolizes what we owe God: the burnt offering—a completely devoted life. Now by contrast, the grain, the oil, and the frankincense—the fruit of the earth—symbolizes what we owe to man. What is our duty to God? The burnt offering. What is our duty to man? The second. So the surrender of our life, as it is being lived in devotion to God, is God's portion. The other is the fulfillment of our duty to our neighbor. Now I am going to give you a verse that sums these up very clearly:
The burnt offering represents our duty to God, and the keeping the perfect fulfillment of the first four commandments. The meal offering represents our duty to man, and its perfect fulfillment represents the perfect keeping of the last six of the Ten Commandments. In doing each one perfectly, we have fulfilled the Ten Commandments perfectly. Of course we understand not a single one of us has ever done it.
Life is what God has claimed as His part of the creation. It is what we owe to God. You will surely recall how that God commands us not to eat the blood. The reason that is given is because the life is in the blood. The inference is that the life belongs to Him because He gave it, and we are to respect His ownership of life whether it is animal life or our life. He is the giver of life. In addition to that we are to respect the fact that the animal gave its life so that we can live. And even beyond that, it foreshadows the sacrifice of Jesus Christ during which His life's blood was shed so that we might live.
Within the context of the offerings then, life therefore symbolizes what we owe to the Source of life—the only life-giver—God. By contrast then, the grain, the oil, and the frankincense—which was a fruit of the earth—symbolize what we owe to man. Remember, this is only in context of the offerings here. Both are our duty. We owe our life to God. So in the one we surrender our life, as it is being lived, to God. In the other is the fulfillment of our duty to our neighbor. It is the standard of the ethic that we are to live in relation to man. It is fellowman's claim on us.
Verse 3 in this chapter is of course qualified by Leviticus 11 and Deuteronomy 14. Meat is in no way forbidden by God. In fact, one must be careful here, because if one refuses to eat meat on the basis of religious grounds especially, that one is skirting right along the edge of doctrines of demons.
There is enough recorded in secular history, as well as inferences in the Bible, to make it clear that the meat or the foods mentioned here in I Timothy 4:1-3 is flesh.
I will not go into this in any detail, but what Paul is referring to here are tenets of certain sects of Nicolaitanism, and Gnosticism that were impacting on the church. It was asceticism and the commanding to refuse to eat meat. Those religions, though they are not called by those names anymore, have never fully gone away. They are still around.
Biblically, blood is a symbol for life. As early as Genesis 9:4, God says that we shall not eat flesh with its life, that is, its blood. In Leviticus, He reiterates that the life of the flesh is in the blood. The best-known application of this symbology is that blood can indicate the payment for sin. This is because one life symbolically pays the life-debt of another.
However, the various covenants show a second application of the symbol of blood, where blood represents life given as a pledge of faithfulness. When God made the covenant with Israel, He had them seal it with blood, which we will see in Exodus 24:
